Introduction & getting started

May 23, 2019 18:16

Updated

Introduction

Welcome to Split! This article will walk through setting up your split instance, installing the Split SDK, and creating your first split to release rapidly and safely with feature flags and measure impact with experimentation. Specifically, it will cover:

Getting Started

Create an account / join an account

We assume you’ve created an account already, but if not, sign up here. If your team has an account, an admin can invite you from the users page in admin settings.

Understand Organizations and Workspaces

When you sign up you are sent a link to create an organization. We utilize your company name as the organization name. This can be changed later in your organization’s admin settings.

Within this organization, you can create multiple workspaces. Your company should have one organization in Split but can have multiple workspaces within that organization. When you first create your organization, you'll have one workspace named Default. This workspace has two environments and one traffic type underneath it. You can rename and edit these environments and traffic types as well as add more.

Workspaces allow you to separately manage your feature flags and experiments across your different business units, product lines, and/or applications. Each workspace in Split has its own separate set of environments, SDK API keys, splits, segments, metrics, and event types.

Understand Environments, Traffic Types and API keys

Environments allow you to manage your splits throughout your development lifecycle — from local development to staging and production. When you first create your organization, your workspace is provided with two environments. These two environments are named staging and production, and can be re-named. Learn more about environments.

Each environment is automatically set up with its own API keys. Use these API keys to connect the Split SDK to a specific environment. If you are setting Split up with a server side SDK, be sure to use the server API key type. If you are setting Split up in the browser or on a mobile client, be sure to use the browser API key type. If you are interested in using Split’s public API, create an admin API key type. Learn more about API keys.

Use traffic types to easily identify the customer traffic you are splitting. A traffic type is a particular identifier type for any hierarchy of your customer base. Traffic types in Split are customizable and can be any key you choose to send to Split, i.e. a user ID, account ID, IP address, browser ID, etc. Essentially, any internal database key you're using to track what "customer" means to you. When you first create your organization, your workspace has one traffic type - user - but you can easily create additional like guest or anonymous. Learn more about traffic types.